Ultrasound method could lead to non-invasive surgical knife

University of Michigan engineering researchers who developed the new therapeutic ultrasound approach said in a statement that it could lead to an invisible knife for non-invasive surgery.

Ultrasound technology enables far more than glimpses into the womb as doctors routinely use focused sound waves to destroy kidney stones and prostate tumours.

The tools work primarily by focusing sound waves tightly enough to generate heat, said Jay Guo, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, mechanical engineering and macromolecular science and engineering. Guo is a co-author of a paper on the new technique published in the current issue of Nature’s journal Scientific Reports.

The beams that today’s technology produces can be unwieldy, said Hyoung Won Baac, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School who worked on this project as a doctoral student in Guo’s lab.

‘A major drawback of current strongly focused ultrasound technology is a bulky focal spot, which is on the order of several millimetres,’ Baac said. ‘A few centimetres is typical. Therefore, it can be difficult to treat tissue objects in a high-precision manner, for targeting delicate vasculature, thin tissue layer and cellular texture. We can enhance the focal accuracy 100-fold.’